sax184

Another approach CATS could take is to charge for parking at the most congested lots only during the AM peak, from 6:30 - 9:00 A.M., and have it be free the rest of the day. This will filter some of the parkers to stations with more free parking that is currently unused, and free up spaces at the congested lots. Yes, it will drive some people away from using transit, but what happens now when someone arrives at 485 and the deck is full? Illegal parking, surely, maybe you get towed from a nearby lot? Or do you decide not to risk that and just drive Uptown? Many of the people who drive to the LRT and work in Uptown Charlotte would surely pay $1/day to save time hunting for a parking space during peak periods, and those who are more price sensitive will sort themselves a station or two closer. No big deal.

The local trips along the line will pick up as more development comes in and the diversity of goods and services along the line increases. If the park-and-ride lots remain underused, over time CATS may be able to sell them off for redevelopment to the private sector or work in public-private partnerships. My key point remains that the FTA process CONSISTENTLY under-estimates light rail ridership, and they apply wildly low ridership estimates when scoring the projects. This should be of concern to people in Charlotte as the Feds say other projects "just miss" being viable.

It's the same model. You can download a document from the FTA website with the 9,100 figure here.(MS Word) The 2025 forecast is listed as 17,900 riders. Perhaps the 17,900 changed between 2003 and 2007 to the 18,500 figure, but the way the 9100 has been quoted several times, it is likely that number has remained constant. The most likely reason the out year figure jumped has been the FTA allowing the inclusion of realized development in the corridor. Ultimately, though, CATS must use the FTA process and have their models approved as "correct" by FTA to receive federal funds. As happened in Minneapolis, Portland, Salt Lake, so Charlotte has also proved how inept the FTA method is at ridership forecasting, and that it is biased towards undercounting ridership.

From Railway Age magazine: 14,000 for the month in February 2008, about 3-4 months after opening. The FTA ridership model was undercounted by only 54%. I can't wait to see how wrong they are after a full year in November. When the weather warms up, even more people are going to start riding and develop a transit habit. As hand-wringing and such continues over FTA ridership estimates for extensions of the South LRT and the commuter rail, just multiply the ridership number by 1.5, or maybe even 2, to get a more realistic number. As long as you want Federal Funds under this administration, apparently you have to pretend the line will do much worse than it is likely to do in reality.

Or, more likely, it could greatly increase the cost of the streetcar by introducing a propulsion system that exists nowhere else, has no competing manufacturers for parts which could lock you into high maintenance costs, and still relies on natural gas or perhaps electrolysis using electricity and water to create the hydrogen. The former introduces fossil fuels back into the propulsion of the streetcar. With electric propulsion, you have the choice of nuclear/coal/natural gas/wind/solar. The latter puts an extra layer of complexity between electricity and movement of vehicles. Hydrail makes no sense from an economics or an energy point of view. It is a solution looking for a problem.

Just a friendly reminder to encourage people to describe these types of incidents the way they actually occur. The train did not hit the car. The car drove into the path of the train. When there is a derailment and a car is hit, the train is not where it is supposed to be. When there is a collision at a grade crossing, the train is where it is supposed to be, and the car is out of place. By describing it as "car drives into path of train"- we help the media put the blame where it belongs, on the careless motorist.

Well, there's always the waiver process, which I believe is what the Cascades service in the Pacific NW did to get the Talgos running. Seeing as the F59-PHI is a very likely engine to pull any SEHSR service, maybe their operation is a model for getting the tilting equipment deployed in terms of the FRA rules. (the F59-PHI pulls the Talgo, I think)

Wow- what a quality post. Great links. The last comment I heard from a SEHSR person on the matter was that since the question of using tilting trains is very much up in the air from the FRA perspective, the SEHSR engineering team was going to try to design the line in a way that maximized speeds for trains that were NOT allowed to tilt. This is where those straight, straight, blue lines near the VA border would be most compelling. Of course, if you design the line this way and then you do get to use tilting equipment, your bonus would be higher speeds through some of the curves, minimizing the amount the train needs to slow to go through certain gradients.

You said: "My guess is that knowing they are going to have to stop in such a short a span they don't try to get the train to top speed." NCDOT says: "The upgraded track allowed train speeds to increase from 60 mph to 79 mph" This is the top speed for passenger trains on Class IV track, which is the class of track between Raleigh and Cary. I posted to clear this up. As for fuel consumption, orulz is right. Another thing to consider is that getting all that metal up to 60 mph takes a good amount of effort, but getting it to 79 takes much less marginal effort.

From the NCDOT Rail Division website:

I googled the acceleration of the F59-PHI engine that pulls the Piedmont, and found .67 miles per hour per second. That means you can get to 79 mph within 1 minute 56 seconds. There's probably a shorter period of braking at the end, so I assume you could cruise at 79 for 4 to 5 minutes. With the same numbers, you could get to 110, the top speed of that engine, in less than 3 minutes. At those higher speeds, I think the 10-mile stop spacing starts to hurt you in bigger time tradeoffs per stop.

You can't do 320% capacity on a plane because on a plane, you can't take off/land safely unless everyone is seated. The light rail is designed to have the majority of passengers as standees, not seated. The point is that 320% seated capacity is CATS definition of 100% TRAIN capacity. When the numbers exceed this on a regular basis, such as special events, it's time to run more trains or run longer trains.

Great post. The answer is that there are plenty of people, especially the JLF, who want to portray the massive success of the Lynx as a failure, and that they will continue to work at tarring and feathering CATS to achieve that goal. The JLF folks set up the federal ridership projections as the barometer of success, and now that it's obvious the projections were way too low, (33% error) the only thing the JLF can do is to assert that CATS can't count. JLF doesn't really care if CATS is or isn't counting the money correctly, they just want to destroy the organization's credibility. It's pretty obvious that the TVMs have many problems, and that they need to be fixed. That being the case, it's not hard to imagine that sorting out fare capture and enforcement on the line is going to be suboptimal until the machines are fixed. None of this has any bearing on ridership, which is clearly well over projections, except for the JLF crowd trying to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt in the city's best public investment in years.

Many transit agencies also sell monthly passes through major employers, but sales tend to occur only once per month, in a bulk payment from a HR dept to the transit agency. I have no idea if CATS is doing this. Many of the larger transit agencies get over 50% of their fares paid in passes. However, there's a difference between expecting $6100/day from the farebox in total (including background payments like those above) and expecting $6100/day in coins and bills from TVMs. The problems with the TVMs are well-documented, and it seems reasonable that until the TVMs are working as intended, fare revenue counts will not be as accurate or what they should be. That doesn't mean ridership, which is not counted based on fare payment, is off. I'd still like to see a link to the website suggesting there is a problem. Until I see some reference to it in a legit news source like the Charlotte Observer, I will assume this is a math problem somewhere.

What website? Can you provide a link?

Service to Wilmington? This is probably ten years away at best, 20 years more likely. While NCDOT has not said as much, it seems that the line to Asheville is the primary priority OFF the NCRR mainline. They have refurbished several stations on that line, and the two F59-PHI locomotives that pull the Piedmont equipment are named "City of Asheville" and "City of Salisbury."

Ultimately, as hydrogen and electricity are both energy carriers rather than sources, many of their benefits are the same: They can be created from multiple sources. Hydrogen can come from electrolosys of water or natural gas, electricity can come from, well, just about anywhere, including wind and solar. A test track out at Pueblo and the mature technology that existing technicians can regularly service in the field are two very different things. Hydrogen power does not make the SEHSR more likely to get built; in fact, it probably lowers the chance of attracting private bond market funding for a portion of the project since it is an unproven propulsion driver. From the speed/acceleration point of view, the line is mostly limited by curvature and shared freight operation, not propulsion technology. NCDOT is already studying the right technology for original deployment, that being diesel-powered trains on conventional tracks. In the future, electrification may make sense. The other stuff (hydrogen/maglev) is just a distraction.

This is a solution in search of a problem. Hydrogen is not a new source of energy, it is an energy carrier, just like electricity. With the French running trains at 357 mph using the best available HSR construction techniques, the hydrail stuff is re-inventing the wheel for no purpose. The world already knows how to build outstanding rail systems in the world with tremendous performance that are not dependent on oil or its byproducts for propulsion. In the USA, we simply choose not do those things.

With 306 acres, you can appease the well-organized "freeze it in time" crowd. Again, you have excellent suggestions. But where's the constituency for it? We've had a few fits and starts of people trying to channel the gripes about the non-urbanity of Raleigh, but the forces of NIMBYism and preservation of the status quo remain much better organized. Maybe the question here that is the answer to a lot of the problems we discuss is actually a meta-question. What would build a constituency for urbanity in Raleigh and the Triangle? WakeUP Wake County? SparkCon?

Well, converting the park as is seems to be the message from Dix 306. We need to "preserve" (read:keep things the SAME) the park! All 306 acres! I love your big ideas. Seriously- you may be the most interesting poster on this board by a long shot. Unfortunately, Raleigh is thinking small bore on most items related to urbanism, which is why the 306 Dix outcome is the option with the most steam in the community right now. Sadly, I feel that in fact, the conversion to a park "as is" outcome is among the most LIKELY end results, of not the most likely one.

Bingo. Ultimately, I believe this is what the Dix 306 movement is about. This is why they never have any answers about what the "destination park" will look like, or how they are going to get people to the "destination park" without massive transit improvements or piles of parking decks. I've been waiting for some evidence to the contrary, but I heard a Dix 306er on the radio this morning, again comparing Dix to Central Park. The mantra to preserve all of Dix as a park without any advocacy for upzoning surrounding neighborhoods or even developing the perimeter and preserving 200-plus acres shows that the 306ers don't understand why Central Park works. You're also right that the $10 million is a pittance. I would expect the State to laugh at such a number.

Everything on this page other than SEHSR is an exercise in fantasy. SC is indifferent to rail and GA actively works against it becoming more effective. Until one can get to Florida without going through those two states, all this stuff is merely talk. VA and NC are spending real dollars on environmental work for SEHSR, and for improvements in their state-specific sections of the corridor.

I don't know how they can talk about funding the Dix 306 plan when there is no plan specified. The lack of detail makes it impossible to have a serious discussion about what it would take to make "the plan" (ha) a reality. Kudos to Silver for telling the truth about what it would cost to run an urban park properly. I could see the current council balking and asking over and over again, "why does it cost more to run than Shelley Lake or Durant Nature Park? It just doesn't make sense!"

Then why the heck did we just give them another $18 million? Another ridiculous suburban subsidy.

Check out this tool for recent train performance. Train 79 is the Southbound Carolinian. Based on looking at recent trips, I'd say you have a very good chance of getting to Charlotte more than 1 hour late, and a very good chance of arriving no more than 1:45 - 2 hours late. The scheduled arrival is 8:14 PM, so I'd count on arriving between 9:15 and 10:15 pm.